from the e-flux 2017-18 booklist
Dear friends and readers:
We are pleased to offer you the abundant selection found in e-flux’s complete list of 2017 books, and to announce our first two titles of 2018—both of which are available for pre-order now.
Together, these six beautiful new and upcoming publications encompass:
The first and only volume of crucial texts—many available in English for the first time—by the radical biopolitical utopianists of Russian Cosmism (e-flux’s first title with the MIT Press); Superhumanity: The Design of the Self (e-flux Architecture’s initial book, published with the University of Minnesota Press), containing more than 50 essays by leading scientists, artists, architects, designers, and academics probing the idea that we are and always have been continuously reshaped by the artifacts we shape ourselves; the diabolical togetherness of a wildly varied and miraculously cohesive collection of essays, poems, short stories, and plays by artists and theorists of the Supercommunity (our first title with Verso Books)—from the eponymous 88-text issue of e-flux journal commissioned for the 56th Venice Biennale—which together trace the negative collective that is the subject of contemporary life—in which art, the internet, and globalization have shed their utopian guises but persist as naked power in the face of apocalyptic ecological disaster and against the claims of the social commons; Art Without Death: Conversations on Russian Cosmism, featuring dialogues between some of today’s most interesting living and resurrected artists and thinkers, bringing Russian Cosmist thought into the contemporary (launched at the exhibition of the same name at HKW this October); What Was I Thinking?, the latest collection of essays by the inimitable Jalal Toufic, who Etel Adnan calls “the most original thinker on the planet”; Adnan says of the book: “What Was I Thinking? is an initiation into thinking. With a mind that is extremely analytical and yet extremely capable of rendering all kinds of knowledge and experiences permeable to each other, Jalal Toufic creates here a ‘summa,’ but an open-ended one”; and finally, the first title we published in 2017, What’s Love (or Care, Intimacy, Warmth, Affection) Got to Do with It?, is a critical collection of 12 texts by e-flux journal contributors on topics of love, care, affection, etc.—which, in all their complications, are forces still much needed in these times.
In short, six distinct packages of three-dimensional joy are available now for every discerning reader on your holiday gift list.
Select titles are available as e-books—all 50% off list price until New Year’s Eve.
2018 e-flux titles available for pre-sale from our publishing partners:
The MIT Press:
Russian Cosmism, edited by Boris Groys (February 2018)
pre-order now
Cosmism was developed by the Russian philosopher Nikolai Fedorov in the late nineteenth century; he believed that humans had an ethical obligation not only to care for the sick but to cure death using science and technology; outer space was the territory of both immortal life and infinite resources. After the revolution, a new generation pursued Fedorov’s vision. Cosmist ideas inspired visual artists, poets, filmmakers, theater directors, novelists (Tolstoy and Dostoevsky read Fedorov’s writings), architects, and composers, and influenced Soviet politics and technology. In the 1930s, Stalin quashed Cosmism, jailing or executing many members of the movement. Today, when the philosophical imagination has again become entangled with scientific and technological imagination, the works of the Russian Cosmists become newly relevant.
The University of Minnesota Press:
Superhumanity: Design of the Self, edited by Nick Axel, Beatriz Colomina, Nikolaus Hirsch, Anton Vidokle, and Mark Wigley (January 2018)
pre-order now
This vital and far-reaching collection of essays and images seeks to explore and reflect on the ways in which both the concept and practice of design are operative well beyond tangible objects, expanding into the depths of self and forms of life.
All 2017 e-flux titles available now:
Verso Books:
SUPERCOMMUNITY: Diabolical Togetherness Beyond Contemporary Art, edited by Julieta Aranda, Brian Kuan Wood, Anton Vidokle (December 2017)
order now—50% off paperback and e-book through January 1!
“Supercommunity traverses every experience, every struggle. It gives voice to art as it does to social critique, to the critique of science in the same way as the syndicalism of the old and new labor-power, to the struggle of artists as precarious workers and the precarious workers as artists.”
—Antonio Negri
*New York: stay tuned for details on a January 2018 double book launch with Hito Steyerl’s Duty-Free Art
Sternberg Press:
Jalal Toufic: What Was I Thinking? (November 2017)
order now
“Situated somewhere close to the spirit of Einstein’s General Theory of Relativity and Nietzsche’s breakthroughs, we can say that Jalal Toufic is indeed a ‘destiny.’”
—Etel Adnan
Art Without Death: Conversations on Russian Cosmism (October 2017)
order now
“Rejuvenation and immortality are going to comprise the defining technological imaginary of our time. This will also constitute the ultimate political question: Will biotechnology lead to perpetual youth and longevity for the rich elite, or to an immortality for all? Everything is pointing to this.”
—Simeon Sorkin
What’s Love (or Intimacy, Care, Warmth, Affection) Got to Do with It? (July 2017)
order now
It is often said that we no longer have an addressee for our political demands. But that’s not true. We have each other. What we can no longer get from the state, the party, the union, the boss, we ask for from one another. And we provide. Let’s see how need and care and desire and admiration have been cross-examined, called as witness, put on parole, made the subject of caring inquiry by e-flux journal authors since 2009.
2017 Sternberg Press e-flux journal series editors: Julieta Aranda, Kaye Cain-Nielsen, Brian Kuan Wood, Stephen Squibb, Anton Vidokle
e-flux e-books on sale—50% off list price, only from now til the end of 2017!
Supercommunity: Diabolical Togetherness Beyond Contemporary Art, 2017 (e-book available from Verso Books; also 50% off)
What’s Love (or Intimacy, Care, Warmth, Affection) Got to Do with It?, 2017 (iBook)
Benjamin Bratton: Dispute Plan to Prevent Future Luxury Constitution, 2016 (iBook + Kindle)
Avant-Garde Museology, Arseny Zhilyaev, ed., 2015 (Kindle + Kobo + Nook available from the University of Minnesota Press; also discounted)
The Internet Does Not Exist, 2014 (iBook + Kindle)
Hito Steyerl: The Wretched of the Screen, 2012 (iBook + Kindle)
Are You Working Too Much? Post-Fordism, Precarity, and the Labor of Art, 2011 (iBook + Kindle)
Season’s readings!
